Shark Tank: So THAT'S what it's for!

13.01.2006
Pilot fish and his assistant are walking past the printer room at their office when they smell something funny. "It's a sort of burning smell, like paper that is hot but not actually on fire," says fish.

Not good, fish thinks, so he and the assistant start hunting for the source. And there are plenty of suspects. Along with the printers, the room contains a two-feet-high power transformer, humming away with large conduits running out of it. There's also a tall box labeled "shredding," with an opening to drop scrap paper into.

It doesn't take long for fish to focus on the transformer. Soon he's carefully extracted five sheets of paper with company information on them from the electrical cube.

"After I asked the staff who did this, one engineer advanced and said he had put the paper in the transformer," fish says.

"What would make him do such a thing? He said that he thought it was the paper shredder, and the humming noise was paper being shredded.